Occupy: US and Australia

The whole movement of occupations is a massive global phenomenon, one barely knows where to begin in discussing it. It’s all over the place, in the sense of existing in cities everywhere, which is a good thing. It’s all over the place, in terms of its political coherence, or lack thereof — which is a bad thing, as a matter of abstract principle, but in the backwards political and cultural context of the US has probably been a very good thing. And it’s all over the place, in terms of its programme, or lack thereof — again, a bad thing in principle, but working very well in a backwards context.
As far as the Australian context goes, the economic situation is nowhere near as dire, and Australia retains more of the remnants of a welfare state, has a fortuitous boom fueling Chinese industrialization and the death of the planet, no great indebtedness, not such massive inequality, not such massive unemployment, not such massive racial disparities, and so on. But the anomie, the dissatisfaction with the system, the alienation and disgust with life under this system is readily apparent. Give it the material conditions, and it will come.
A particular difference, relevant to Australia, is that one of the major factors that made Occupy Wall Street into a mainstream phenomenon in the US, was the support of unions. And not just verbal support, but their ability to mobilize thousands to demonstrate in support. So far as I know, that was completely absent in Australia.
The state repression was brutal, which is always sad and infuriating. I don’t think it’s surprising; the gratuitous viciousness meted out to movements, nonviolent or not, which challenge the system in fundamental ways is a constant of history. It is only shocking when one forgets the history; and the history of radical dissent in the last few decades, especially in Australia, is shockingly thin.
I was more surprised by the nonviolence of occupiers in the face of such police violence; all the more so, in the cases of Berkeley and Davis. Certainly nonviolence in such circumstances is correct strategically, and almost always in principle, particularly in the present day when the State reigns so supreme in the means of violence. Still, it is quite astonishing to note that, faced with the bone-crushing savagery of the police attack, there was a complete absence — to a man — of anyone willing to try to lay a finger on these vicious thugs. The level of admirable principled nonviolence is stunning, and all the occupations I know of are virtually unanimous in their commitment to nonviolence. I do wonder how much of it is more a reflection of a general ineptitude in violence, rather than a principled commitment, but either way it is quite heartening. There is part of me that would have loved to have seen some cops decked along the way, getting a taste of their own medicine, that it would have been rough justice; which, I suppose, is only human. And no doubt there is a time when a commitment to nonviolence and turning the other cheek becomes an invitation to be treated as a doormat. But we are not there yet, and in any case the nonviolence has been very positive in effect: it wins support to the movement when it remains nonviolent in the face of such brutal violence, and it makes a stunning statement of principled action. It was clearly the right strategy here.
I think there is more to the difference in Australia than just the economic situation. I would add cultural factors, which in general require engaging in speculation and exaggeration; I am exaggerating tendencies I perceive in the following. Australian society is much less forthright on matters of principle. An American proudly states their mind, and they and all around swell with pride in their first amendment and free speech. An Australian does it, and everyone tells them to get their hand off it. I tend to think the circumspection in Australian culture is generally better practice, as the first real lesson of democracy is knowing when to shut up, and the appropriate time to open one’s mouth. (Not to mention the propensity for proudly self-announced moral virtue to stink of hypocrisy.) On the other hand, of course, the zero’th real lesson of democracy is knowing how to talk. So the square full of nonconformist signs and people and behaviours sits more easily in the US than Australia; or at least, certain parts of the US. I don’t doubt Australia could do it too of course.
One more even more speculative cultural thing. Post-invasion Australia is a nation of convicts; this leads to some mistrust of authority, which can be healthy, but usually this only applies in contexts where it is irrelevant (traffic police, elected politicians, etc). But more importantly in the present context: Australia is also a nation of wardens. Any threat disturbing the peace of conformity and resignation raises the greatest annoyance and indignation, until the deviant elements are hauled off and taken away, out of sight, and all returns to the order and stability of the prison. That is the Australia of wardens: silent, clean, and white.

To gaily marry

Argh. Anti-gay-marriage argument!
There are some arguments worth considering against the gay marriage movement — for instance, whether it’s the best strategic focus. Is queer liberation best achieved by conforming to dominant practices and institutions like marriage, or is there a better means and focus of struggle? And of course, there are long-standing arguments, especially those made by feminists, made against marriage itself, as a patriarchal, hierarchical, and historically oppressive social institution. Since I am not gay, though, strategy for queer liberation is less a question for me, and one on which I defer to the people who are most affected.
However, these arguments against gay marriage are not the ones one tends to come across in the mainstream. Such as our sample here.
Let’s put aside Akerman’s more hilarious notions. Gay marriage is “inconsequential”, so that queer people and their concerns are of no consequence — recall, the first step in hatred of the other is to deny the humanity of the other. On the other hand, doing something about climate change is “demonic” — I wonder what is of consequence then? The queer community “loses” Akerman because they called for non-discrimination in donating blood — can he possibly be serious, and even if so, can he possibly be serious using this as a reason to oppose the queer community’s call for gay marriage rights? Is a more complete non sequitur posible? He even appears to regret the legalization of gay sexual acts, and he propagates stereotypes of queer people as attention-seeking and sexually obsessed. This particular article seems determined to offend anyone who cares about climate change, discrimination against gay people (even in donating blood), deficit spending, internet infrastructure, the environment in general, and more; including anyone who knows a non-hetero person. Being so ridiculous, it’s more of a laugh, and probably won’t convince many people.
But let’s put this aside and get to the one argument he does make.
“[M]arriage is the union of a man and a woman. That’s right – it is the practice of individuals of opposite sex joining in a recognised civil or religious bond. That is the definition of marriage. Anything else is not marriage.”
A standard tactic to shut down debate about marriage is to make it a matter of definition. Having made the definition, if you don’t satisfy it, you are excluded.
The problem is that social issues are not mathematics, and words of social description do not have mathematical definitions.
Language does evolve over time — and, thankfully, a single person can’t control it. You cannot stop a political movement by reading a dictionary at them.
(Case in point: Akerman’s usage of “homosexuals” for queer people gives him away as a fossil.)
I’ll be happy to use the word “marriage” loudly and clearly to describe married gay couples, and will repeat, and repeat, until this argument sounds as antiquated, as obscure, as esoteric, and as irrelevant as the overzealous grammarian decrying a split infinitive.
Marriage is a social practice that evolves through time in any society; and social struggles do involve changes in language. It may be a good or bad institution. But love is love, and stable, loving, life-long relationships are entitled to the same legal and social status regardless of sexual orientation.
To marry, to marry, to gaily marry, adverb and verb, woman and man, man and woman, woman and woman, man and man, and everything in between.

The limits of tyrants

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
— Frederick Douglass
[an extended version of the usual quote]

Psychiatry

“Consider the shrink. Many mental problems originate not in diseases of the brain but in deficiencies of society. The arduousness of living with unfulfilling work, financial insecurity, arbitrary bosses, lack of solidarity and insufficient personal power, together with the anguish caused by racism, sexism, ageism, lookism, ableism and all the other oppressive hierarchies that plague this society, helps explain the fact that more than 10% of the population (and not counting those with substance abuse disorders) suffers from mental or emotional problems. There are enough troubled individuals in the United States to keep busy 100,000 psychiatrists and clinical psychologists and a much larger number of clinically trained social workers and other mental health professionals. People’s mental problems often appear as deviations from social or legal norms and therefore are problems for the status quo as well as for the deviant individuals.
The problems of both would be solved if troubled individuals abided by the values of the status quo, and of course the mainstream mental health system more often than not works to alter behavior in that direction. But attempting to adjust people to the unhealthy society that caused their problems in the first place may not always be the healthiest approach for either the individuals or society. A simple alternative would be to help some trouble individuals bring out, clarify and sharpen their implicit critique — to strengthen them for the struggle in which they are engaged, instead of removing them from it, because the struggle can be both therapeutic for the individual and beneficial to society. But the institutions of mental health, such as hospitals that employ psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, are institutions of the status quo. They are not about to turn the troubled into troublemakers, no matter how healthful that might be. The mental health professional is someone that such an employer can trust to move confused people away from struggle with social norms and authority and toward a life in which they are “well adjusted” to their place in the socio-economic hierarchy.
As professionals, psychotherapists are “nonpartisan” in their work: They just help ill people get better. But to declare extreme nonconformity an illness, as psychology professionals often do, is a partisan act because of the down-on-the-victim therapeutic framework it rationalizes: “Treating `sick’ individuals” is a much more politically conservative framework than is “treating individuals troubled by a sick and oppressive society.” Evidently it is not the place of the clinicians to question the health of the society to which the patient must be adjusted. Their “legitimate” professional concern is how best to bring about the adjustment. In this alone, they are expected to use their creativity. The few who do raise questions are seen as “getting political,” even though it is hard to imagine how they could get any more political than mainstream clinical psychology itself, which often practices conservative social action disguised as
medical treatment.”
— Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds

Sutured TQFT, torsion, and tori

(29 pages) – on the arXiv – published in International Journal of Mathematics.

Abstract: We use the theory of sutured TQFT to classify contact elements in the sutured Floer homology, with \(\mathbb{Z}\) coefficients, of certain sutured manifolds of the form \((\Sigma \times S^1, F \times S^1)\) where \(\Sigma\) is an annulus or punctured torus. Using this classification, we give a new proof that the contact invariant in sutured Floer homology with \(\mathbb{Z}\) coefficients of a contact structure with Giroux torsion vanishes. We also give a new proof of Massot’s theorem that the contact invariant vanishes for a contact structure on \((\Sigma \times S^1, F \times S^1)\) described by an isolating dividing set.

STQFT_torsion

"Libertarian" purity test

“Should all taxes be abolished?”
“Should all legislation be replaced by judge-made law…?”
“Should police be privatized?”
“Should we abolish worker safety regulation?”
“Should the law itself be privatized?”
Mostly kooky, and good for a laugh I guess.
Any serious libertarian opposes not only illegitimate domination and authority by the State, but in all its forms… including the most obvious today, by capital. In the present, the State at least is subject to some forms of democratic control. Capital is not, and remains tyrannical in its nature. Serious libertarians realised this by the 19th century. As long as one does not recognise that, the use of the word “libertarian” is laughable. “Proprietarian” would be a much better word. Redistributive taxes, worker protections, etc, should be supported by all serious libertarians, not because they empower the State, but because they oppose entrenched, centralized, undemocratic economic power and support those without it.
But this is obvious. It takes an education to forget it. Or to be in the service of entrenched economic power.

The rationalist fall of man

To be truly happy, you must understand that the world is terrible.
The small scale is sometimes not depressing; that is why so many remain there. Personal lives may be joyous or melancholy, personal relationships may be fulfilling or abusive, personal activities may be empowering or self-destructive. But to this day the flowers still bloom, the lovers still embrace, the children still play, families still grow, the artists still create, the musicians still play and the people still dance, and happiness, in whatever measure we are able to steal it, accumulates. There is love in every day and every small human action. Alienation, consumer society, the market, and the leaden weight of financial and personal and institutional burdens have not yet entirely destroyed these pleasures, though they try and though they often succeed. Beneath every maniacal institutional role, beneath every soul-crushing occupation, beneath every deadening task and every snarl of cynicism and sarcasm flailing behind it, lies a human capable of love and sympathy. In most cases, anyway: the corporate executives, the politicians, the leaders — like the kings and aristocrats and other malevolents before them — are selected for by institutional psychopathy, and have in great measure become assimilated. But even they can often turn off pathology at home’s front doorstep.
Even beyond the cuteness of the small scale, there is beauty to be found, though usually only by leaving humans as far behind as possible. The human world stands insignificant before the natural one, though we chip away at its achilles heel, goading it to crush us, and with us, civilization. The goading threatens even these pleasures, yet for the time being they remain a palliative. We have swamped the Pacific with garbage, but its waves still roll onto the shore. We will melt their glaciers shortly enough, but the cordilleras still tower to the ends of the earth. All the more so as we melt the ice caps, oceanic vastness surrounds us. And though our excrement even extends there too, the nothingness of interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic space retains the beauty of unspoilt darkness.
Beyond and behind it all, within the fabric of reality, even transcending it, lie inspirations and joys of the most sublime beauty; how I wish I could immerse myself there permanently! Accessible only to our greatest faculties of abstract reason, they present a challenge to understand and a puzzle we cannot yet solve. Only reason can seek this realm, and only reason can understand it. This greatest of beauties, cold, austere and monumental, by its nature precludes access to the ignorant, and renders answers which, while the greatest of our oracles still only hear the faintest murmur of the final answer in its signals, shine with eternal simplicity and abstraction. These physics — and behind them, their language, mathematics, the language in which not just this but any reality can be written — remain a haven of coherent peace, even if they constitute the laws according to which their most complex consequences, namely ourselves, destroy their unfolded beauty in reality. There is no personal being there, none of the superstitious remnants of past ages of human folly, with their moral judgments and crosses and crescents and candles; but there is inspiration, and beauty.
So peace, love, joy and bliss are available to us at many levels, depending on our predilections and preferences and interests — even in a world of violence, horror, and ongoing and oncoming catastrophe. But depression, or at least, certain knowledge of great tragedy, is unavoidable too: and, I would say, is necessary to understand and overcome if one is to live fully.
Indeed, depression is written into the nature of the universe. Love is not so written, though it unfolds in us as a consequence of this nature; nor morality, nor pain, nor suffering. Depression, however, is so written: the thermodynamic heat death of the universe will come, one way or another, to claim human and whatever other civilizations ever exist. Just as no loving creator, but only a malevolent one could create our world of violence, poverty, and war, nor could such a loving creator ever make such a universe, doomed to decay and oblivion.
To understand the world, you must know that it is terrible beyond comprehension. This is true not just of physics, but of human individuals, and human society too.
While love, concern, sympathy, and care are not written in the constitution of the world, they are its consequences. Conscious beings evolving out of it become aware of their own strange place in this universe, born and evolved as exiles on these inhospitable shores. Death, fear, and suffering await, and reason finds that other beings share the same fate as us. Evolutionary solidarity combines with cold rationality to demand that the suffering of one conscious being is the suffering of all, and the joy and flourishing of one is the joy and flourishing of all. Love is not written in the constitution of the universe, but it is written in the constitution of every conscious, subjective, solipsistic universe that evolves out of it. Death is not the heat death of this universe, but its utter annihilation, and an annihilation that will come shortly enough for us too. Depression, or at least consciousness of mortality, is written into the nature of your personal universe, as well as that of the physical universe.
But this recognition of shared consciousness, mortality, and suffering, is the rational basis of sympathy, caring, and love. It is aggravated by the knowledge of suffering. It is shocked by the knowledge of systematic social oppression. It is infuriated by the continuance of injustice. It is outraged at the thought of physical aggression or violence. And it is apoplectic against violent aggression in the form of war. Those who are relatively rich, or powerful, or live in certain geographical regions, may think that such catastrophes do not affect them. But even there economic institutions crush the soul, via the need to sell one’s labour, via mind-numbing work, via obedience to usually illegitimate authority, via participation in destructive systems and corporations, via the manipulations and subterfuge of capitalism and markets, via the system which threatens to consume humanity. Only the ignorant or the foolish can analyse the world around them — even the rich western corporate utopia that a minority find themselves in — and find it other than a valley of tears. Peronal lives may sometimes be a garden of delight, but at the social scale the situation, and the outlook, has usually been bleak.
In these circumstances, the most immediate source or depression — human society — is also the most tractable. Fixing human society is a ridiculous idea, surely! But fixing the fundamental sources of depression in realms at other scales — individual mortality, cosmic absurdity — are entirely impossible.
These twin primordial catastrophes — your imminent oncoming death, and the nothingness at the end of the universe — are the rationalist version of the fall of man. They are the fruit of knowledge achieved by conscious beings, and they transform the practice of living: from a frolicking in delight in the garden of sensual pleasure, to a struggle of purpose and survival as exiles on inhospitable shores, individual, social, and universal.
One may indeed still frolic in the garden, at least until human civilization makes the garden uninhabitable; and indeed, never forget to frolic as best you can! But to remain here represents a failure to grow up, a failure to mature, a failure to live fully. We are faced with the certainty of tragedy at almost every scale, except the social scale, where tragedy is only highly probable. That is precisely the scale which depresses us so much, because every missed opportunity, every failed election, every stymied reform, every bigoted reactionary and ignorant blowhard and ignored comment and ineffective activism represents, in the final analysis, a theft from the human potential in our short lives, on a small planet, in an unfathomable universe.
And if we do spend our short, insignificant lives attempting to improve that fate of that society, preserving and improving its glories, its rationalities, its joys and its beauties — and ending its greed, its hypocrisy, its violence, its war, its exploitation, its inequality, its injustices — what better achievement could we hope to build? What other achievement could be more worthwhile? And not doing so, guaranteeing the worst possible outcome — why then would life have been worth living at all?
What else could give meaning to human life once we have rejected, as irrational and unbelievable, the magical fairytales of eternal life and eternal justice with which past superstitions have attempted to comfort us? In fact those superstitions induced us to accept injustice in this world, for better luck in the next. There is no such world, and if we shall ever again enter the celestial city, we shall have built it ourselves.
But that means dedication; it also means conflict and argument; civilizing, to be sure, but not without personal costs. If we are serious about building a society in which human potentials can be realised, then this entails a revolutionary transformation of social institutions. This is to be expected: the universe is an uncompromising place, and human society has been uncompromising with its planet. We must be uncompromising in forging a compromise between our species and the rest of the world; in ending the rapacious systems of environmental destruction and human exploitation which ruin the planet and our selves.
Love — arising rationally from our nature, as an answer to the fundamental questions of human existence — leads us to a hard place, to an extreme place, to a place laced with outrage, fear, incomprehension, frustration, anger, impatience, rage, probable defeat, and potential doom; but it is this place, and only this place, from which we can really see the stars, from which we may survey the coastline of these inhospitable shores, and from which we can really walk towards a better future — one consciously created for ourselves, so that human beings may flourish.